Car bomb near Moscow
Killed Darya Dugina: Her father, Alexander Dugin, supplies Putin with the ideology for the Ukraine war
Far-right thought leader Alexander Dugin
© Mikko Stig/Lehtikuva / DPA
Russian TV commentator Darya Dugina died in a car bomb. But this was probably intended for her father: Alexander Dugin. The right-wing thinker is considered by some to be the “most dangerous philosopher in the world”.
Why did Darya Dugina have to die? Who is responsible for her death? And should she even be the victim of the car bombing? Two days after the 29-year-old Russian publicist died on her way back from a patriotic festival in a Moscow suburb, the speculation and rumors drown out the scant results of the investigation many times over. There are many reasons for this: The assassination took place in the heart of Russia. It hit a supporter of the Ukraine war. And it is possible that the Russian secret service is behind it instead of, as the Russian propaganda obviously drums up, supporters of Ukraine.
Darja Dugina: “Ukrainians are monsters”
A colleague of Dugina, the editor-in-chief of the Russian state TV channel RT, Margarita Simonyan, said Darya was a “young, smart, beautiful and incredibly talented woman”. She “could have become one of those people who form a new popular ideology for Russia.” The prominent foreign politician Leonid Slutsky agrees with the lawsuit: “This barbaric murder of Darja – that is basically a terrorist attack on the ideology and the uniting of the Russian world.” The term ideology has often been used in recent days when it is mentioned. And not only because she attracted attention with sentences like “Ukrainians are brutes,” but also because she was close to her father, whom many call a fascist and some even a Putin whisperer.
“Our revolution will not stop in (Western) Ukraine. It must be carried through Europe. If it succeeds, then we will begin to liberate Europe from American ideology. That is the true goal of ‘Eurasism’ “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Every step we have taken so far, crushing the Chechen separatists, liberating South Ossetia and Abkhazia and now Crimea, is a step towards the European revolution.” These ominous words come from March 2014, shortly after Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula. They were written by Alexander Dugin, the father of the murdered Darya.
Dugin and Putin think similarly
The 60-year-old professor and ex-politician of the now banned Russian National Bolshevik Party has worked his way up to become a mastermind and driving force for Western European Nazis and fascists as well as parts of the Kremlin leadership. Though his reputation as a “whisperer of Vladimir Putin” is exaggerated, the two men’s mindsets and perspectives are uncomfortably close.
“Although he holds no official office, Dugin is considered a key ideological figure,” said the German government in response to a request from the Left Party. “The völkisch-nationalist positions propagated by Dugin provided the template for the illegal attack on Ukraine,” said MP Martina Renner.
Experts have been warning of the head of the “Katehon” institute for some time. British author Paul Ratner called him “the world’s greatest dangerous philosopher” in 2016. The letter from the federal government states that its think tank is a “right-wing extremist think tank” characterized by an anti-Western and anti-liberal attitude. Ideological leitmotifs are “the creation of a unified cultural space of Slavic-Orthodox Russians and Russian dominance over large parts of Europe and Asia”.
Sexual freedom a noticeable thorn in the side
What Dugin and Putin have in common is a deep aversion to “the West” and its supposedly decadent culture. Both repeatedly emphasize two elements: the Russians as a kind of chosen people and the remarkably often cited sexual freedom, such as gay marriage. Both men often castigate them as unnatural apparitions. “The Eurasian ideal is the powerful, passionate, healthy and beautiful person, and not the cocaine addict, the bastard from worldly discos, the asocial criminal or the prostitute,” said the philosopher in his Font “Euroasia above all“.
In Dugin’s best-known book, the “Fundamentals of Geopolitics,” which is also widely read among Western right-wing extremists, he specifically outlines which neighboring states he considers to be core components of Russia. In addition to Ukraine, that would be Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, even Finland. In his concept of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” even the Christian Orthodox countries of Serbia, Romania, and Greece belong to the Russian sphere. It is unclear whether these ideas and myths of an East Slavic ethnic unity are anchored in Russian society, says Düsseldorf historian Heidi Hein-Kircher, but Putin’s government has been exploiting them for propaganda for years.
Such right-wing nationalist tones have long been socially acceptable in Putin’s empire. But they don’t always go unchallenged. Russia’s domestic secret service FSB reports almost daily arrests of suspected terrorists who are said to have planned attacks on behalf of Ukraine. Explosions like the ones recently seen in occupied Crimea are said to be attributable to the partisans. In addition, many groups in Russia are now fighting among themselves over ideological positions in the domestic field, said Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak.
Is the FSB behind the attack?
Asia and Eastern Europe expert Ruslan Trad spread the thesis on Twitter that the attack could also be an act of revenge by the FSB. “Especially since Dugin, rumor has it, is telling Putin that the FSB is to blame for the poor results in Ukraine.” In any case, many are convinced that Alexander Dugin himself was the target of the attack. According to the media, father and daughter wanted to leave the patriotic festival together. But Dugin stayed while the daughter drove off.
Dear readers, parts of the text about Alexander Dugin are taken from the stern play “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok – which traditions Putinism conjures up”.